Ideas for the "Rich get richer" problem

[Necronile]

They could shorten the time it takes to take over a richer empire's base,
what I mean is that the more resources an empire has,the faster the time of her base
being captured by a poor empire.

[The Kush]

Originally Posted by Malorn

Perhaps in another 8 years of PS you might have a clue about empire and population dynamics.

I know more about that then you could dream of, unlike some people who seem to be confused. As I have said and Panda put really nicely.. there are too many hexes it would be nearly impossible to pin an empire to their own base. An empire simply spreads out and hits multiple targets at once, that would be one quick and easy solution. You can't put your full force against an empire you have pinned because you will have to defend your hexes from two factions. This WILL NOT be an issue.

[Kran De Loy]

Originally Posted by Toppopia

I think the only reason they do it is either they are stupid or its normally the closest place to go, but i think the first reason sounds most likely.

Combination of both. Now think of the same thing happening on a much larger scale. It would logically fix itself should it happen on a large enough scale, but there will always be exceptions and there will be times when a very large amount of people will all do the same stupid thing all at once because they haven't got their brain turned on and those times will happen much more often then they should.

Originally Posted by Necronile

They could shorten the time it takes to take over a richer empire's base,
what I mean is that the more resources an empire has,the faster the time of her base
being captured by a poor empire.

Not such a great idea. The larger a faction expands the more it has to cover until a certain point when the battle lines begin to shrink again. At first you'd think that would be a reason to support your idea, but at that point the concentration of players for the smaller empire becomes much higher within their own territory. Essentially it becomes a matter not of one faction gathering too much, but the other factions have too little room for roughly the same amount of people.

If the factions with less territory lose even more territory then the bigger empire begins to really see an increase in back hacking. Which while difficult for the invaders, they would only really need a 100 or so to pull up to double that of the larger empire's people off the front line for the invader's empire to push back out again.

Originally Posted by The Kush

I know more about that then you could dream of, unlike some people who seem to be confused. As I have said and Panda put really nicely.. there are too many hexes it would be nearly impossible to pin an empire to their own base. An empire simply spreads out and hits multiple targets at once, that would be one quick and easy solution. You can't put your full force against an empire you have pinned because you will have to defend your hexes from two factions. This WILL NOT be an issue.

Glad to see you've been paying attention. /sarcasm

[Eyeklops]

How about a "cap" on how much resources an individual can "hoard." That way there is defined limit to how "rich" you can be resource wise.

[Kran De Loy]

Er.. I thought this was about faction empires and territory/resource control now rather than individual player resource pools.

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by Eyeklops

How about a "cap" on how much resources an individual can "hoard." That way there is defined limit to how "rich" you can be resource wise.

While resource caps are certainly needed on a per-individual basis (there was another thread on that topic recently), this is more of a difference in resource-rate issue between two empires on the same continent. Even with a small cap a rich empire can consistently pull the most heavily upgraded loadouts while a poor empire might be struggling just to pull stock tanks / aircraft. When they clash the poor empire is at a disadvantage, either because they lack the resources to even pull a competing vehicle or because the vehicle they pull has fewer upgrades. The disadvantage is by-design and is the purpose of the resource system, however it also perpetuates the dominance.

With enough continents the rich-get-richer problem might not matter as much as you could always go to another continent. But with only 3 continents getting pushed back in one will be limiting to an empire, and getting pushed back in two will really suck. The one continent where you might have enough resources to consistently pull the loadouts you want could be population-locked or just terribly laggy due to the high concentration of players being forced into a small space after getting hammered on the other continents.

If the factions with less territory lose even more territory then the bigger empire begins to really see an increase in back hacking. Which while difficult for the invaders, they would only really need a 100 or so to pull up to double that of the larger empire's people off the front line for the invader's empire to push back out again.

I agree that back-hacking is the way out of a situation where your empire is pushed back to very few territories. However, the way the capture system works it gives a huge benefit to the defender, both in stopping the hack and in re-capturing the territory if it is taken. I had an analysis of that capture system here:
http://www.planetside-universe.com/s...ad.php?t=40416

So there's two systems working against the "poor" empire in this case:
1) few resources to wage war
2) the dominant empire has few vulnerabilities in their territories due to most of them having many other adjacent territories, and as a result the poor empire is at a severe attacking disadvantage

All it would take is a few old fashioned rapid-response squads to stop the back hacks. Even if they escalated the back hacks they're still at a severe disadvantage, and the defenders have access to effectively all the resources they could want to fight them off.

Both of these issues need to be addressed in some fashion, and giving the dominant empire a penalty to their resecure/capture rate seems like a good way to counteract the second problem (prorated of course as they gianed more territory the penalty increases). That would make it easier for the back-hacks to succeed, since back-hacks are unlikely to be successful normally by-design. It would also make it easier for the 3rd empire to enter the scene to help push back the dominant empire.

[Aaron]

There are two other factions. If one is to overspread, then it is likely they won't be able to hold it down.

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by Aaron

There are two other factions. If one is to overspread, then it is likely they won't be able to hold it down.

Of course they wont' hold it down forever, but they could hold it down enough to make players' life on a particular empire/server miserable. Since the game is F2P it is likely that players will have multiple characters on different empires, possibly even on the same server. When one empire gets beaten down we'll see the same behavior we saw in PS1 - players will either jump ship to the "winning" empire or go to another server where things might be better. This exacerbates the problem for the empire that lost. This was the "fourth empire" phenomena in PS1. There must be incentives to keep an empire fighting and help facilitate a comeback to prevent the exodus that will occur when an empire's back is broken and they get pushed back to a handful or less of territories on a continent.

The important thing to realize is that this happened in PS1 without resources or a territory control system that makes it easy to hold territory when the neighboring territory is friendly. Both of these make the problem significantly worse than it was in PS1. There are many good ideas in this thread to help mitigate it, but denying that it is a problem is rather silly.

[Marinealver]

How about making an Insurance system where if say if the empire, outfit, or player looses an item/upgrade or base investment that he put spendible resources that player will get a portion of that credit/resource back. The percentage will depend on the risk of it being loss so investments on the frontlines will be refunded 90% while those closer to sanc and away from the main fighting will only be about 40-50% or mabey even less. That way the victors still get to reap the rewards of using their resource investments wisely by not loosing any but those on the defeated end will have more flexibility and won't be too penaltized.

[Malorn]

The problem with refunds is that it discourages the capture of territory. If you are sufficient as-is with few resources but a large refund you don't have much motivation to fix the problem. It's a welfare system that doesn't encourage people to go out and get themselves off of it.

That's one reason I gravitate around ideas involving making territory capture against a large empire easier and increasing the territory capture rewards against those empires. In that way an underdog empire has incentive to capture territory and doing so will at least temporarily help offset their low resource situation. There's no incentive for them to stay in the low-territory situation and the territory capture reduction makes it easier to do back-hacks and split up the dominant empire and actually successfully start making a comeback. In general it also makes large empires bigger targets so it helps naturally solve the problem and encourage 2 empires to gang up on a dominant empire to prevent the situation from even getting that bad.

[Kurtz]

Originally Posted by Malorn

It's a welfare system that doesn't encourage people to go out and get themselves off of it.

Just like IRL ;P

[Neurotoxin]

So there's two things I see that reduce the problem here. One is the default gear, one is passive gains.

So when we respawn, it won't be in pajamas with the default loadout. It is going to be with some kind of weaponry, in some kind of armor. Vehicles are a luxury, but when resources and footholds are getting narrow, sometimes players may have to bite the bullet and go a few lives with more simple infantry gear and tactics.

I'm guessing there will be a passive amount of resources that every participating soldier will receive regardless of hexes owned. When we have a ton of bases and footholds, we are granted a lot of resources plus whatever we'd get as the default amount. When we have fewer hexes conquered, we are still getting regular passive resource gains in addition to the meager trickle coming in from the remaining footholds.


Personally, my solution for this is to increase the amount of resources collected from slaying combatants of factions with more hexes. If your faction has more hexes than the opponent, you only get the default 100 per kill. However, for each hex more that the opponent's faction owns, resources earned for the kill are increased.

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by WildVS

I know it's probably around here somewhere but I'm too lazy to find it. But has there been any sort of indication of dynamic resource relocation on a map?

Higby indicated that the resources would shift around back in July, but in the recent AMAA he said they are currently static.

It is unknown if they will stay static or if they will move around later, or some combination of the two.

[Shlomoshun]

Here's my two cents. First, I'm assuming populations are mostly blanced, like at 40%/30%/30% for the three sides. If it's worse than that, they'll need PS1 type faction rewards to get the populations in balance. Assuming they are at 40/30/30 at worst, the 40% one shouldn't be able to dominate any of the weaker factions unless the 2nd faction is also helping them out. So balancing out the faction dominance should be built around encouraging #1 to focus on #2 and #2 to focus on #1, while allowing #3 to build itself up. As long as they incentivize rewards this way, none of them should be able to really ever pull away from the other 2 by that much...

Personally, I like the idea of carrots for the underdogs more than i like the idea of Sticks for the stronger side...but the right answer should probably involve both to some extent.
I dislike resource diminshing returns, since the idea of the game is to get control and thus resources. Getting less for holding more land seems counterintuitive.

Combination Carrot/Stick methods:
One way they can provide some balance is by smart placement of resources. The middle ground should provide more what i will term 'luxury' type resources. Things that fund 'extra' types of efforts, not those that fund the basics of your war making capability. The hexes close to each sanctuary should provide more basic resources that do most of the fueling of the war efforts, that way you don't really cut down on any factions ability to fight by much until they are significantly pushed back. Topographically, areas near the bases should be designed to help the weaker faction take them back....Whether thats through providing protection for infantry flooding in from the sanctuary, back doors to bases that face towards the sanctuary so that faction has the more direct route in, etc..., the goal should be to allow the weaker side to have the ability to take back those areas more easily with the more simple vehicles and tactics necessary. Another combo carrot/stick proposal would be that although they have mentioned that the more adjacent hexes you control, the quicker the hacking, what if proximity to one factions sanctuary also had an effect on their hacking speed. That would mean taking a hex right next to another factions sanctuary would take a long time of control, while them taking it back would happen quite quickly for that faction....2 hexes away from the sanctuary would be less so and so forth... This makes sense from the view that areas near a sanctuary would be more loyal to that faction, and thus more easily controllable by them...

Carrot/Reward methods of faction balancing:
Though these would help the losing faction, they would also apply to the the middle sized faction to focus on the winner and not so much the loser.
One great subtle suggestion that I liked from earlier was the direction of auto-generated missions slanting away from the weakest faction, so the auto-missions for the strongest faction would push them more towards #2, and #2 would be pushed towards #1, thus allowing #3 to recover it's footing. Other possible carrots could be more direct, such as XP/resource increases for fighting near your sanctuary, or just for fighting the #1 faction (for both the smallest and the middle factions to encourage them to work mostly towards bringing down #1) or bonus damage when fighting against the winning faction (again for both the smallest and the middle sized faction).

I think if they can just incentivize factions #2 and #3 to mostly aim towards #1 at all times, you'll see that domination is difficult to obtain unless the server has a huge pop-imbalance, which is sort of a different issue altogether.

[Eyeklops]

How about an additional modifier to the base capture time? The more territory an empire owns, the faster it can be captured by an enemy empire. Also, make back hacks harder to re-secure if you own over a certain % of a continent.